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Fundation, a leading digitally-enabled lender and credit solutions provider, today announced that it has secured a $120 million asset backed credit facility from SunTrust Bank. Waterfall Asset Management was included in the facility as a Class B lender. This additional credit facility further enhances Fundation’s capacity to extend credit to small businesses across the United States. Sam Graziano, CEO of Fundation said, “Garnering the support of one of the…

Ranieri Solutions, a financial services technology investment firm founded by Lewis S. Ranieri, father of the securitized mortgage market, has partnered with Symbiont, the market-leading blockchain and smart contract company, to explore opportunities to use Symbiont’s platform to systemically improve all aspects of the mortgage industry. The combination of Ranieri’s deep knowledge of the mortgage market coupled with Symbiont’s expertise in deploying enterprise blockchain networks...

Fundation Group LLC, a leading digitally-enabled lender and credit solutions provider, today announced that it has acquired a variety of assets from online small business lender, Able Lending of Austin, Texas. Fundation develops a wide array of strategic partnerships with banks, other financial institutions, and various service providers...

Symbiont, a pioneer in the use of smart contract technology for institutional financial markets, has been awarded the 2017 Buy-Side Technology Award for Best Distributed-Ledger Technology Project by Waters Technology. Last year, Symbiont also won the inaugural award in this category. Judges included five buy-side focused technology consultants and four Buy-Side Technology journalists, and they used an auditable and transparent methodology to recognize leading technologies and...

Citizens Bank is enhancing its small and medium-sized business (SMB) lending offering by digitizing the loan application process, according to a press release published by the financial institution (FI) on Thursday (Nov. 2). The bank is launching a new platform, built in collaboration with alternative online lender Fundation, allowing SMB customers of the bank to apply for a loan or line of credit and receive an approval online. Citizens said...

By Jordana Starr | September 25, 2017 (Innovate413): Amherst Mindfulness owner Michele Miller offers educational courses and workshops relating to mindfulness—a form of meditation that involves awareness of one’s present thoughts, feelings, body, and environment—at the Yoga Center in the heart of downtown Amherst. When she first started teaching, she was frustrated with the lack of a single platform that could allow her to market her business, register students, accept payments, and connect virtually with her students. As Miller recognized a need for an integrated platform...

BOSTON – September 20, 2017 – Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc. today announced the appointment of four new members to its board of directors. Dr. Patrick Conway, Jim Rosenthal, Dr. Jay Skyler and the Honorable Bob Kerrey will be joining the board. Each of these industry leaders and experts in their fields are expected to add significant and sustained value for Intarcia as it continues to develop and advance life-changing therapeutic options to address treatment and prevention outcomes in some of the most devastating and costly chronic diseases around the world. They will also provide...

BOSTON – September 15, 2017 – Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc., announced top-line results from FREEDOM-3S which assessed the tolerability and optimal dosing regimen of two different ITCA 650 (exenatide in osmotic mini-pump) dosing approaches when switching patients with type 2 diabetes from stable therapy with liraglutide to ITCA 650. The trial demonstrated that patients receiving 1.2 or 1.8 mg of an injectable liraglutide treatment can be switched directly to the full dose six-month ITCA 650 60 mcg/day osmotic mini-pumps. Patients tolerated the switch to ITCA 650 very well. There was also no statistically significant difference in safety or tolerability when switching directly to the full dose six-month 60 mcg/day mini-pumps versus first switching to the..

Patrick Byrne may finally get his vindication. The chief executive officer of Overstock.com Inc. has fought for a dozen years against a market abuse called naked short selling, where investors bet a stock will drop without first taking the required step of borrowing shares. He says it was used back in 2005 to drive down his company’s stock, an episode that spurred a Securities and Exchange Commission probe and set Byrne on a crusade to improve accountability in the system that underlies U.S. stock ownership. Finally an answer is near, thanks to Delaware. Last month, the home state...

Medici Ventures and Symbiont today announced the completion of a strategic investment in Symbiont by Medici Ventures, a major investor in blockchain technology. As part of the new relationship, the two companies will collaborate on strategic projects involving both Medici Ventures and its parent company, Overstock.com.

Earlier this year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with Intarcia Therapeutics to invest $140 million in a yearly pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent the transmission of HIV. Intarcia is at a critical phase in developing the new technology, which could reach far beyond HIV prevention. The company hopes to expand...

Symbiont, the market-leading smart contracts platform for institutional applications of distributed ledger technology, today announced a strategic partnership with Chinese software giant Hundsun Technologies Inc, which includes an investment by a division of Hundsun in Symbiont’s Series A-1 round. The investment is Hundsun’s first in both the United States and in distributed ledger technology. Symbiont’s board of directors...

In the future, it may be possible to prevent HIV through the help of a miniature pump that’s been implanted underneath one’s skin. That’s the promise of the pharmaceutical company Intarcia Therapeutics, whose chairman and president Kurt Graves spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference Tuesday in San Diego. Intarcia is currently developing an HIV-preventing drug and treatment technology that Graves hopes could eventually solve a big problem facing the health care industry and the treatment of chronic diseases

Traditional life sciences investors have made lots and lots of money from recent multibillion-dollar exits like Receptos, Alios and Acerta. But lately I’ve noticed a different life sciences investing strategy, one closer to the way social/mobile/software investors invest. By paying higher entry prices for later mega-rounds in ambitious life sciences companies, including both therapeutics and non-therapeutics companies, these deep-pocketed investors hope to reproduce their earlier successes investing in the likes of Amazon and Tesla. Their capital, which comes without the usual board seats and tight monitoring, is deeply welcome, because it allows these companies (similar to consumer companies like Airbnb and Uber) to stay under the radar much longer than...

Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc. and the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr) today announced a strategic research collaboration focused on the development of a novel peptide therapeutic leveraging Calibr’s Stapled-Peptide Platform Technology. Intarcia plans to develop and administer this novel therapy in combination with Exenatide (a GLP-1 receptor agonist and active agent in Intarcia’s ITCA 650 product), by leveraging its proprietary Medici Drug Delivery System™. Under the terms of the agreement, Calibr will...

If 2016 marked the year that Delaware became the first US state to implement block-chain technology, 2017 will mark another first. This year, we expect companies will be able to file documents on our distributed ledger, in addition to current filing procedures. But while we're just one state in one country, this move is no small feat – a large majority of the "foundational" documents of finance including incorporation documents (that form the foundation of securities markets) and UCC filings (that form the foundation of secured lending) – are filed here. Delaware is home to more than 66% of Fortune 500 companies and 85% of initial public offerings...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing as much as $140 million to support development of a tiny implantable drug pump it believes could help prevent people in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere from becoming infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The matchstick-size pump is being developed by Intarcia Therapeutics Inc., a closely held Boston biotechnology company. It can hold six or 12 months’ supply of medicine and is designed to deliver microdoses continuously to patients, ensuring they stay on the treatment. The new investment, which Intarcia announced Thursday, comes amid a flurry of...

Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc., today announced it has completed its second major close of the Series EE equity financing, and also entered into a relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help prevent the spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa and other countries where the HIV epidemic is most severe. “Thanks to tremendous financing progress, an even stronger shareholder base, our recent NDA submission in type 2 diabetes, and now a groundbreaking relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Intarcia is poised to open up a totally new category of important once- or twice-yearly treatment and prevention therapies for some of the world’s most serious chronic diseases − including those that disproportionately affect people with some of the greatest unmet needs,” said Kurt Graves, Chairman, President and CEO of Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc...

Traditional banks are beginning to embrace their alternative lending competitors as a way to reach more borrowers and get a jumpstart on the technology and digitization behind the lending industry. The latest bank to take part is Citizens Bank, which announced Tuesday (Dec. 20) a partnership with Fundation Group. Fundation has emerged with a reputation to collaborate with banks, not work against them, by offering up its credit solutions and lending technologies to traditional FIs. For Citizens, this means small businesses can apply for...

Kayon Partners, in partnership with AmherstWorks, have launched The Kayon Accelerator located in downtown Amherst, Massachusetts. The new entity will act as a nexus for new businesses and entrepreneurs, combining a range of in-kind services, hands-on help and a co-working location with an expert team focused on positively impacting the trajectory of early-stage businesses. Steve Garrow, Amherst College graduate and Managing Partner of Kayon Partners, added, “The support of the local community has enabled us to...

Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc. announced it has submitted its New Drug Application (NDA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for ITCA 650 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes (T2D). The NDA submission was made in close proximity to World Diabetes Day, and during National Diabetes month in America – two annual events that remind us that type 2 diabetes is one of the largest and fastest-growing public health crises in the world. If approved, ITCA 650 would become the first and only injection-free glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist therapy. ITCA 650 provides consistent and continuous subcutaneous delivery of exenatide via an osmotic mini-pump placed just under the skin in a simple in office procedure that only takes a healthcare provider a few minutes to perform. ITCA 650 mini-pumps were given with

Indeed, for all the excitement over paradigm-shifting technologies in healthcare and medicine—gene-editing through CRISPR, virtual reality surgical training—it seems we are seeing more and more examples of people solving age-old problems through a stroke of ingenuity. With the proverbial popsicle stick and chewing gum, that is. And sometimes, the two are combined: a bold new technology is coupled with a strikingly simple, intuitive innovation. That has been my initial impression of a new drug-delivery system, called the Medici, which is made by Intarcia Therapeutics. The Medici is...

A Delaware judge has advocated for using blockchain-based voting to put more power in the hands of corporate shareholders. Delaware Chancery Court Vice Chancellor J Travis Laster spoke late last month during a meeting of the Council of Institutional Investors, a non-profit organization dedicated to institutional investment issues. In his speech, Laster took aim at the business ecosystem for proxy voting – services that enable shareholders to cast votes on corporate decisions – arguing that “the current system works poorly and harms stockholders”. But Laster's remarks didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier this year, the government of Delaware launched an initiative to use the technology as a means to streamline the business registration process in the state. The state government is working with New York-based startup Symbiont on the project...

The startup behind a fun, augmented reality tattoo app called InkHunter, covered by TC back in April, is launching its Android app out of beta today — after racking up some 2.5 million downloads on iOS. They’ve been beta testing on Android, as they worked to ensure their AR tech could handle a range of hardware and slower Android devices, but are launching officially now. Their app idea started life as a project cooked up during a 48-hour hackathon back in mid-2014, but the startup is now looking to move beyond being just an app for virtually trying tattoos...

First up, the Delaware initiatives will work on using blockchain technology to store contracts and other essential corporate data on a distributed ledger, which will allow companies and agencies to store their documents in more than one location, keep them more secure and automate access by constituents, shareholders and employees. Other benefits include lower costs and longer documents retention, according to Caitlin Long, chairman and president for Symbiont, a technology provider working with the state on “smart contracts. Typically, when documents are stored manually, the document is destroyed once the mandatory retention period passes,” Long said. “This will solve a big problem…

Intarcia Therapeutics, Inc., today announced the first closing of a major equity financing that puts the company in a strong strategic and financial position over the next 2-3 years as it prepares for the potential approval and launch of ITCA 650 late next year, and the parallel progression of several novel pipeline programs in major chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity and auto-immune/inflammation. The first close of $215M financing includes subscriptions from new world-class institutional investors, family offices, and our first large and long-term oriented VC/PE fund located in

Regions Bank, together with Fundation Group LLC, a digitally-enabled small business lender, and TruFund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), today jointly announced a first-of-its-kind agreement to provide small dollar loans to underserved small businesses. Through this unique and collaborative agreement among a regional bank, a digitally-enabled lender and a CDFI, underserved small businesses that may not be eligible for traditional bank loans will...

Until very recently, online banking was widely believed to be an unstoppable bank slayer. As recently as a year ago, alt lending CEOs were commonly touting as inevitable the ascension of online lenders over big and inefficient banks in regards to consumers and SMB lending. These days the claims have gotten a bit less lofty, and victory focused — with a lot more founding CEOs sounding a bit like Fundation’s founder Sam Graziano, and touting their ability to cooperate rather than crush.

Aug. 23, 2016 9:29 a.m. ET - Wall Street Journal -- Another lending upstart has declared that joining banks—rather than beating them—is the way to go. Fundation Group LLC, which makes online business loans, this week completed a $100 million credit facility with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to the lender’s chief executive. The new credit line will help the firm expand its recent partnerships, including those with traditional banks...

AMHERST, Mass., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Investment group and business development firm Kayon Partners is forming a new company in conjunction with UMASS to commercialize a unique food technology developed in the laboratory of Prof. D. Julian McClements based in UMASS Amherst, MA. The new company, which will be led by Kayon Partners principals Stephen Garrow and David Vogel, will work with Dr. McClements, the UMASS Tech Transfer Team and with established companies and thought leaders in the food and drug industries, to...